Re: [gentoo-user] Tips/Tricks for Gentoo on low-spec computer?

[Steven Lembark <lembark@wrkhors.com>]

> I'm in the process of installing Gentoo on a rather old
> machine. It's an old HP Pavilion with a 450MHz Celeron
> Mendocino and 256MB of PC133 SDRAM.  I'm using an nVidia PCI
> FX6200 video board instead of the i810 on-board chip, and it's
> got a decent hard drive (160GB).
> 
> I was wondering if there were any particular tips/tricks for
> getting the best performance out of such a machine.  It's to be
> used for basic word processing and a few games.  Hopefully the
> nVidia 6200 will allow OpenGL to run fast enough for something
> like TuxRacer.
> 
> I chose XFCE for the desktop along with both Abiword and
> OpenOffice. I probably should have installed OOo from a binary
> package, but I decided to build it just to see how long it
> would take (so far it's at about 26 hours and counting).

Fvwm is lightweight.

Make a point of compiling the kernel without anything
you don't need; if you might need something then make
it a module.

Don't run daemon's you don't really need. For example,
log into the command line and use "startx" or "xinit"
rather than having the thing boot into an X11 login.

Use a large amount of swap compared to ram (with your
drive maybe 2G) and avoid tmpfs for working storage.

If all you're using the thing for is surfing or basic
development then it should work fine. The old standard
for using X11 was a minimum 12MB of core and 40MB disk.
For a long time that was difficult, then IDE came along
and big disks got cheaper :-)

-- 
Steven Lembark                                            85-09 90th St.
Workhorse Computing                                 Woodhaven, NY, 11421
lembark@wrkhors.com                                      +1 888 359 3508